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- Romeborn, Andreas, 1981
(author)
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La Syllepse chez Francis Ponge. L’exemple de La Cheminée d’usine
- 2009
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Book (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This study focuses on the use of syllepsis in the work of Francis Ponge (1899-1988). According to the definition used here, this rhetorical figure exploits the polysemy or homonymy of lexical units, activating two senses in one word occurrence. Through the analysis of Ponge’s poem “La Cheminée d’usine” (1961), this study seeks to illuminate the ways in which the syllepsis functions, also to outline the quantitative importance of this figure in Ponge’s work, as well as to identify certain characteristics of Ponge’s texts as far as the use of this rhetorical figure is concerned. “La Cheminée d’usine” was chosen for its representativity in terms of syllepsis. After having differentiated the syllepsis from related phenomena – antanaclasis, dead metaphors, active metaphors, zeugma and puns – the study puts forward an analysis model which identifies the presence of two textual elements as a requirement for detecting a syllepsis: a) the occurrence of a sylleptic term, i.e. a word simultaneously used in two different senses, b) the presence in the co-text – left or right, narrow or wide – of an indicator, i.e. an element that allows the activation of an additional sense of the sylleptic term (chapter 2). Applying this model to the analysis of “La Cheminée d’usine” (chapter 3) has revealed a number of distinct ways in which the figure may function, each with its own mode of detection: syllepses with (narrow) right co-text, syllepses with (narrow) left co-text, syllepses with wide co-text and intertextual syllepses. Moreover, the analysis of the poem has made it possible to describe certain stylistic traits that depend on the use of this rhetorical figure. The quantitative results of this study underscore the remarkable preponderance of syllepses in “La Cheminée d’usine” (chapter 4): of all the words that could be used in a syllepsis, one out of five carries a double meaning. This study points to the syllepsis being a central figure in Ponge’s work. The figure seems to epitomize a writing principle that appears at different levels of the text and which consists of imparting multivocal meaning to a single unit.
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